Much of the history of the Global Chaucers project could be written be detailing a series of chance encounters and missed opportunities. One of the more recent examples of a chance encounter was my meeting Danko Kamčevski (Metropolitan University of Belgrade) this past November at the Chaucer in the Age of Medievalism conference at the University of Lorraine (Nancy, France). He not only knew about Boris Hlebec’s 1983 Serbian translation–Džefri Čoser’s Kanterberijske priče–but offered to send me a copy. Indeed, just a few days after the conference, he wrote that he’d found a copy and gone to the post office to mail it, only to be informed that, in response to the ongoing tariffs, the Serbian Post Office does not allow packages to be sent to the United States.
Meanwhile, Danko has shared a careful explication of Hlebec’s translation of a passage from The Knight’s Tale as well as forwarded Sergej Macura’s 2025 article examining the metrical and lexical equivalences between Chaucer’s Middle English General Prologue and Hlebec’s translation. He has also notified me that Professor Hlebec has recently died. Never getting to correspond with Chaucer’s Serbian translator is my missed opportunity.
Eventually, I’ll find a way to get Kanterberijske priče, and both Danko Kamčevski’s explication and Sergej Macura’s article will contribute significantly to my current writing project. I do wish, though, that I could have thanked Professor Hlebec for his contributions.
The first translator I interviewed for Global Chaucers was Nazmi Ağıl, Chaucer’s Turkish translator, in April 2013. Jonathan Hsy and I had launched our project only a few months earlier, and we were still trying to determine who was out there, what they were doing, and how we would approach them.
Early in developing Global Chaucers, I had downloaded the New Chaucer Society membership list and contacted anyone with an affiliation outside the Anglophone academic sphere. I asked for information about translations, adaptations, as well as courses that included Chaucer in their reading lists. Among the many who responded, we heard from a colleague in Turkey who pointed us to Nazmi and his translation, Canterbury Hikâkyelieri.
As it happened, I was scheduled to be in Istanbul for the opening of a close friend’s art exhibit. To make the most of the opportunity, I contacted Nazmi. We met for coffee at Taksim Meydanı, the large public square where, a month later, the Gezi protests were met with violence. But that day, the square was bustling and normal. And inside the coffee shop, Nazmi taught me how to ask translators questions. Later that week, we traveled up the Bosphorus, almost to the Black Sea, in order to visit Nazmi’s classes at Koç University and to meet his students and colleagues. In many ways, meeting Nazmi marks a shift in my understanding of the Global Chaucers project.
In subsequent years, we’ve met again in Istanbul and in Reykjavík (for NCS 2014 and the first iteration of the Polyglot Miller’s Tale!). We’ve even published together in a 2018 special issue of Literature Compass: Chaucer’s Global Compaignye.
Our most recent joint appearance has been in Medievalism and Reception, an essay collection edited by Ellie Crookes and Ika Willis. Published earlier this fall by D.S.Brewer in their Medievalism series, the volume closes with Nazmi’s absolutely gorgeous “Hosting Chaucer’s Pilgrims in Turkish.” If you want to read about translating Chaucer from one of his best translators, get your hands on Nazmi’s essay.
And if you’re curious about role of translators in ensuring Chaucer’s readership, note this: Canterbury Hikâyelieri is in its 9th edition!
Lian Zhang, our foremost authority on Chaucer’s reception in China, has published an article in the most recent issue of postmedieval. This time, her research deals with the Republican period, a span roughly corresponding to the years just before WW1 and just after WW2 when several young Chinese scholars studied in the U.K. and the United States with some formidable medievalists. In addition to bringing Chaucer back to Chinese university classrooms, the Chinese scholars often brought these mentors to China, thereby working to create fruitful ties between China and the west.
I reproduce here the article’s abstract:
This essay studies the teaching of the medieval English poet Geoffrey Chaucer in China during the Republican period (1912-1949), through evidence of students, faculty, institutions, and textbooks. Drawing on university curricula, diaries and recollections of professors and students, and publications of textbooks and modern adaptations of Chaucer’s works, this essay provides a detailed narration of an early part of the reception history of Chaucer in China. Chinese scholars studied Chaucer in Europe and America since the 1910s, gave courses on Chaucer after returning to China, and published Chaucer’s text in Middle English and modern adaptations. The teaching of Chaucer had a great impact on Chinese students and the academic world at the time, and it reflected China’s literary and cultural initiation into what the social reformers saw as modernization in a socially transitional period. This essay argues that Chaucer played a significant role in Chinese discourses of modernization over the twentieth century, and that the Chinese Chaucer was created by two types of reception, as he was claimed both by social reformers for his role in promoting the vernacular language and by traditionalists for the moral themes of his tales. Literary education at the time was influenced not only by China’s pursuit of modernity signified by a rise of vernacular Chinese language and literature, but also by the traditional cultural values grounded in Confucianism.
We were very pleased to hear from Laurence Warner that the Medieval Symposium at last week’s International Association of University Professors of English (IAUPE) conference in Rome included a presentation by Professor Ewa Kujawska-Lis on “Canterbury Tales in Polish.” Of course, we contacted Ewa right away. She kindly provided précis of her paper for us to share with the Global Chaucers community. We look forward to learning more from her as she expands our knowledge of Chaucer’s long and deep presence in Polish translations and scholarship.
In Poland, Chaucer’s artistry was first noticed by two outstanding literary figures (poets, writers, and journalists): Ignacy Krasicki (1735-1801) and Adam Mickiewicz (1798-1855). Well acquainted with European literature, they offered appreciative comments on the English poet almost a century before any Polish translation was available. Readers needed to wait until 1907 to get the feel of Chaucer themselves. This is when Jan Kasprowicz (1860-1926), a poet, playwright, critic, and translator, included fragments of TheGeneral Prologue and a large section of The Friar’s Tale in his anthology Poeci angielscy (English Poets). The translation, consisting of about 20 pages, served as an introduction of Chaucer to the Polish literary system and was based on the edition of The Canterbury Tales by Thomas Tyrwhitt (1775-78) and a German translation by Wilhelm Hertzberg (1866).
Half a century later, in 1956 Przemyslaw Mroczkowski published his monumental study Opowieści kanterberyjskie na tle epoki (The Canterbury Tales against the backdrop of the epoch), originally written in 1951, which was a milestone in introducing Chaucer to Polish scholars in the vein of what would be in the future termed cultural poetics. Subsequently, in 1988, he also translated The Knight’s Tale.
This served as a complement to the first more extensive translation of The Canterbury Tales into Polish that was created by Helena Pręczkowska and published in 1963 (Wrocław: Zakład Narodowy Im. Ossolińskich, 1963; reprinted in 1978 and 1987) (image at left). This volume included The General Prologue and eleven Tales selected by Witold Chwalewik, based on his rather arbitrary decision as to which stories should be translated.
Finally, the complete translation of The Canterbury Tales was published in 2022 as the second volume of a non-commercial series Bibliotheca Translata by the publishing house Biblioteka Śląska (image at top). The translation was done by Jarek Zawadzki, a translator of literature from English and Chinese, based on Walter W. Skeat’s edition of 1894, with illustrations by Maciej Sieńczyk, a graphic artist, illustrator, comic book creator.
Vindolanda: destination for one of three NCS excursions and excellent reminder of the many peoples involved in the Roman colonial project.
The 2022 NCS Congress featured an inspiring number of sessions with a global or multi-cultural perspective. And a good number of presenters were from non-Anglophone backgrounds, though many were unable to attend in person because of visa, funding, and pandemic restrictions.
Because there’s still a chance for you to view the Congress sessions and uploaded presentations–here’s a quick list of the papers/sessions dealing with Chaucer’s reception, global and otherwise, that I attended.
Papers
Jacqueline Burek, “Translating Troilus: The Welsh Troelus a Chresyd“
Louise D’Arcens, “The Kangaroo Kelmscott: Chaucer’s Sydney Afterlife and Australian Deep Time”
Aistė Kiltinavičiūtė, “Reimagining the Dream Poet: Edward Burne-Jones’s Dantean Chaucer”
Usha Vishnuvajjala, “Feminist Medievalisms and Chaucer in Jane Austen Fanfiction”
Wajid Ayed, “Chaucer in Tunisia: 50 years”
Raúl Ariza-Barile “From Southwark to the Citee of Mexico: Producing the First Ever Mexican Translation of The Canterbury Tales”
Lian Zhang, “Translation as Remembering: Canterbury Tales in Chinese”
Yoshiyuki Nakao, “How to Translate Chaucer’s Multiple Subjectivities into Japanese: Ambiguities in His Speech Representation”
Amy Goodwin, “Chaucer in the New York Times”
Jonathan Hsy, “Racial Displacements: Chaucerian Poets of Color and Critical Refugee Studies”
Jamie Taylor, “Indigenous Studies and a Global Middle Ages”
Candace Barrington, “Comparative Translation: Possibilities and Limitations”
Jonathan Fruoco, “Is there an Embargo on Chaucer in France?”
Marion Turner, “The Wife of Bath’s European Lives”
Plenary Sessions
“Where Medieval Studies Joins Up,” a plenary conversation chaired by Jonathan Hsy featuring
Anthony Vahni Capildeo
Wallace Cleaves
Ananya Jahanara Kabir
The Refugee Tales, with Patience Agbabi
The Polyglot Miller’s Tale Reading
If you were a registered participant at the Congress, you can view the sessions and individual papers.
Go to ncs2020.net
Click on Attendee Hub and log in just as you did during the Congress
Select “All Sessions” on Schedule pull-down menu (upper)
Search for the speaker’s name, then follow the links to replay either the session or watch the uploaded presentation.
These links will remain available until mid-October.
I was delighted to learn about a fairly recent project headed by Mary Flannery, Amy Brown, and Kristen Haas Curtis. Its name, COMMode, wittily points to the scatological humor many readers associate with Chaucer and his Tales. The project investigates and queries the relationship between Chaucer’s modern reception and his obscenity, a set of important questions that have fascinated me for a couple of decades. Moreover, they are reaching beyond the usual suspects. Already the site’s blog has featured descriptions of two global Chaucers: Shing Yin Khor’s oracle cards (link and images above) and Chaucer in 19th-century Australia.
It all started a while back in Toronto, during the last congress of the New Chaucer Society–well before the familiar world ended. Sometimes during the congress, it was mentioned by Ruth Evans how the NCS ought to find ways to get closer to non-Anglophone Chaucerians, and France was mentioned at some point. That had me reacting for obvious reasons, as I had noticed the absence of French medievalists in the last few congresses. I knew the state of Chaucerian studies in France, but I had no idea so few of us actually moved around in international academic events. That is a strange state of affairs, especially for a poet like Chaucer whose writing is marked by internationalism and European culture, but who is at the same time “vraiment nôtre par filiation”, as Émile Legouis wrote one hundred years ago.[1]
Yet, we have to recognize here an unpleasant truth: Chaucer is fading away in the Francophone world and has been doing so for a while. As Frenchified as he was, he had the idea of writing in English; that is a crime the French cannot forgive. Not only because we are rubbish in English (think about John Cleese as a French soldier taunting King Arthur in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, and you’ll have a pretty good idea of where we’re at), but because we have gradually stopped showing interest to our medieval past. There are no medievalists available to teach medieval English literature in France because universities have cut down those jobs: the fewer teachers you have in a discipline, the fewer students can learn about it and later on become teachers themselves. As a result, no university is now willing to create a teaching position in this field: correct me if I’m wrong but Sorbonne Université is probably the only one in France offering an introduction to medieval English literature and languages in its optional–but quite popular!–“Histoire de la langue” classes for third-year students. The situation seems just as complicated in other Francophone countries. Mary Flannery, for instance, recently discussed on this blog Chaucer’s appearance in Switzerland’s high-school curricula and explained that he “is most often mentioned by name and much more rarely taught before university–my students very often have heard of (or even studied) Chrétien de Troyes in high school, but have often never heard of Chaucer.”[2] Indeed, according to my estimation, more than 60% of the Francophone population has never heard of Chaucer, while 92% of them know who Dante is, and 75% know Chrétien de Troyes![3] Sadly, things are not getting better, and medieval literature as a whole is disappearing. One of the latest reforms of the French educative system has even put the kibosh on the presence of medieval literature in the CAPES Lettres, the competitive examination for the selection of secondary school teacher.
Something must be done. It was accordingly decided in Toronto during a meeting that turned into a dinner to propose a new edition of Chaucer’s poetry in French: the NCS and the Global Chaucers Project would support and encourage the endeavor, and I would be in charge of putting it together. I decided quite early on that the best way to introduce students (in high schools and universities) to Chaucer would be by producing a bilingual edition with a brand-new prose translation done by one single translator. Since no one in their right mind would agree to translate all of Chaucer’s work on their own, I thought I would do it. Mainly because I had a very specific vision of what I wanted to produce–something that might have been impossible to force on my fellow translators. It’s not that I had a clearly defined theory of translation, but I wanted to translate Chaucer in poetical prose, and I had a notion of how my own French could mimic Chaucer’s Middle English. The idea would be to almost transform Chaucer back in the original language that influenced him rather than modernizing everything. I will come back on this soon in a new blog post.
However, as I wanted to (re)introduce Chaucer in French, I tried to stay in touch with the real world: my edition would not only need to be bilingual but also instructive and affordable (otherwise what would be the point?). I was therefore delighted to work with a publisher as respected as Classiques Garnier who instantly accepted my offer of a complete bilingual Chaucer and offered me a contract for as many volumes as necessary. The texts themselves, of course, would not be enough to (re)introduce Chaucer, and I, therefore, commissioned a series of introductions. I would write the general introduction but then ask a dream team of Chaucerians to introduce each poem to a brand-new audience. I’m incredibly proud to present here, for the first time, the outline of this edition and the names of the scholars who accepted my invitation.
Volume 1
Introduction
Le Livre de la Duchesse : Ardis Butterfield
La demeure de Renommée : David Wallace
Anelida et Arcite : Candace Barrington
Le parlement des oiseaux : Susan Crane
Volume 2
Troilus et Criseyde : Barry Windeatt
Volume 3
Lalégende des dames vertueuses :Rosemarie McGerr
Poésies diverses : Anthony Bale
Volume 4
Les Contes de Canterbury : Helen Cooper
Volume 5
Boece : Tim Machan
Le Traité de l’astrolabe : Yoshiyuki Nakao
Volume 1 will be published in 2021 in Garnier’s “Textes du Moyen Age” series. The other volumes will then follow in the years to come. I would like to thank the New Chaucer Society, Global Chaucers, Classiques Garnier (especially Richard Trachsler) and all the scholars who have contributed, for their support.
I look forward to sharing with you all my reflections on this amazing project in future blog posts!
[1] Legouis, Émile, Geoffrey Chaucer, Paris, Bloud, 1910, p. v.
[3] For more information on these data, see my upcoming conference presentation—“Is There an Embargo on Chaucer in France?”—during the next New Chaucer Society congress in Durham (July 2022).
Our many thanks to the individuals and organizations making these resources easily available to readers, students, teachers and scholars throughout the world.
Congratulations to Lian ZHANG on the publication of her essay, “Chaucer in China: A History of Reception and Translation” in Chaucer Review 55.1 (2020), available online through Project Muse.
Here’s the abstract.
Arranged chronologically, this article presents a general picture of Chaucer reception and translation in China, and examines the development of criticism and the interaction of readers with both the original texts and their Chinese translations. By using indicators like university curricula, editions of translations and reprints, criti- cal analyses, adaptations, and popularizations, this study shows that there have been increasing readership in medieval literature and rising admiration for the poet through- out the reception history, with occasional sharp changes. This reception pattern is deter- mined by a combination of factors such as the intrinsic qualities of the texts, readers’ concern over contemporary social issues and their own literary past, and the political and intellectual context of the nation as a whole, as well as of interaction with the outside world.
